SOURCE: SOCIAL MEDIA TODAY

Social media mar­ket­ing is a great way to help launch your start­up. It’s cheap and effec­tive — if you have a strategy.

Where do you start? How do you attract cus­tomers through plat­forms like Twit­ter, Insta­gram, etc.? This guide will help you answer these ques­tions and more.

Here are 8 essential tips to help your social media marketing efforts:

1. Do your market research

Are you ready to begin tweet­ing? Hold on a minute there, part­ner. Before you start blast­ing out social media updates, you need to do your home­work. Ran­dom acts of mar­ket­ing will waste your time and your mon­ey. Social media mar­ket­ing for star­tups requires a nuanced approach.

Before delv­ing into the wild world of social media mar­ket­ing, do exten­sive research on your audi­ence. You’ve prob­a­bly already done some ini­tial mar­ket research when you cre­at­ed your busi­ness plan. Now it’s time to do this research again with social media behav­iors in mind.

2. Find out which platforms your audience is using

Con­duct­ing mar­ket research will help you refine your mar­ket­ing goals.

Important metrics you should be keeping account of:

  • The loca­tion of your tar­get market
  • The online behav­iors of your tar­get market
  • How long they spend on the internet
  • Which social media plat­forms they use
  • How often they use social media.

Instead of sign­ing up for every social media plat­form, find out which plat­forms your cus­tomers use most. It’s a far bet­ter use of your mar­ket­ing dollars.

3. Use the same handle for every platform

Con­sis­ten­cy is impor­tant. Using the same han­dle for every plat­form will make it much eas­i­er to find and fol­low you.

If you use dif­fer­ent han­dles, it can con­fuse your tar­get mar­ket. You want to make your brand iden­ti­ty crys­tal clear and as strong as a dia­mond. With so much com­pe­ti­tion, it’s absolute­ly nec­es­sary to stand out from the crowd by mak­ing a superb user expe­ri­ence, one that is sim­ple and easy to understand.

4. Create a high-level social media marketing plan

Now that you’ve got the basics of your social media research fin­ished, you’ll want to craft a high-lev­el plan for each and every plat­form. Try to avoid plans that get too spe­cif­ic as these won’t help too much in the begin­ning. In fact, they can hin­der the process.

Draft a mar­ket­ing plan for each plat­form based on your research. Set week­ly and month­ly goals such as acquir­ing ten new fol­low­ers, expand­ing your reach by three per­cent, or com­mu­ni­cat­ing with twen­ty poten­tial customers.

marketing plan

5. Focus on mastery

It can be tempt­ing to try to con­quer every sin­gle social media plat­form. You may think that being present on lots of social media sites will mean increased expo­sure. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that’s not always the case.

It’s a bet­ter bet to focus on a hand­ful of plat­forms. If you con­cen­trate your efforts to plat­forms where your cus­tomers already are, you’ll like­ly see bet­ter results.

6. Build a brand message

Build­ing a brand mes­sage sounds like some­thing only fan­cy glob­al cor­po­ra­tions do, but even a small pre-rev­enue start­up can do it.

How does an up-and-com­ing start­up craft an excep­tion­al brand message?

First, find out what you want to say. Do you want to tell them how great your prod­uct is? Do you want to tell them how your start­up is adding val­ue to society?

Pick a mes­sage and go with it. Then, you sim­ply study the lan­guage of your con­sumer. Speak to them in their language.

7. Post consistently

You’ve picked the right plat­forms, craft­ed a mar­ket­ing plan and cre­at­ed an effec­tive brand mes­sage. Now it’s time to keep your cus­tomers engaged by post­ing con­sis­tent­ly.

You may think that post­ing dai­ly or hourly is the tick­et. It’s actu­al­ly bet­ter to make sure you’re con­sis­tent. Post­ing every week at the same time is bet­ter than post­ing hourly one day then not at all the next.

Post­ing con­sis­tent­ly will make it eas­i­er for your cus­tomers to find you and under­stand your brand.

8. Use social media marketing automation tools

You’re not in this alone. Even if you’re unable to hire employ­ees, you’ve got a few tools that will ease the bur­den of social media management.

Mar­ket­ing automa­tion tools can help you sched­ule and deploy social media updates from one sin­gle dashboard.

A few notable examples of top social media automation software products:

  • Hootsuite​
  • Buffer
  • Hub­spot
  • Social Flow

You can’t go wrong with any of the prod­ucts list­ed above. Do your own research to see which automa­tion soft­ware prod­uct is the right fit for you.

Conclusion

Social media mar­ket­ing sounds like a sim­ple thing for a start­up to do. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s a bit more com­pli­cat­ed than it may seem at the outset.

Fos­ter­ing effec­tive social media strate­gies means you’ll need to mas­ter the basics of social media research and communication.

You can start on your social media mar­ket­ing jour­ney by doing your mar­ket research, find­ing which plat­forms your cus­tomers are on, and cre­at­ing a high-lev­el mar­ket­ing plan for each and every platform.

Using the same han­dle for every one of your startup’s accounts, post­ing con­sis­tent­ly, and speak­ing in your customer’s lan­guage will help make your brand strong and your mes­sage clear. Focus­ing on mas­tery by select­ing only a few plat­forms and lever­ag­ing social media automa­tion tools will help save you time and mon­ey down the road.

Use these eight tips to help you get your social media mar­ket­ing and man­age­ment off the ground. Sup­ple­ment these tips with some of your own research and plan­ning to ensure social media success.